Apocalypse now

The TV programmes you watched as a child are like acid flashbacks. You never fully understood them at the time and you understand them even less now that you’ve forgotten most of the context and detail. But by golly, don’t they half haunt the imagination ever after?

Terry Nation’s late Seventies series Survivors had just this effect on me. It was about the aftermath of a killer virus which wipes out virtually the entire human species leaving just a handful of survivors to roam the earth, scrape by without TV or electric lights or hot showers, and generally rediscover the old agrarian ways before we became so dependent on technology. The ultimate fantasy of the modern green movement, in other words.

Not having seen the series in 30 years, I can’t vouch for how crap it was. But I would suspect not crap at all. Terry Nation was a scriptwriter of some genius. He invented the Daleks — indeed many of early Doctor Who’s best storylines — and he created Blake’s 7, and he had a knack for writing cultish drama which not only pushed all the right ‘scare’ and ‘tension’ buttons at all the right moments, but which was also intelligent and profound and stuck in your brain in the way, say, Dennis Potter dramas do.

And now the BBC has done a remake — Survivors (BBC 1, Sunday and Tuesday) and it’s really dismal. It’s like a case study of all the things that have gone wrong with telly in the intervening period: the shallowness, the political correctness, the hacky scripting, the so-so acting, the crassness, the stereotyping. It’s born not out of love of the medium, but out of fear. Fear of not getting the right number of minority viewers; fear that the audience is going to switch off at the slightest hint of intelligence or sophistication and play a videogame instead; fear of originality or depth.